Feeling Sad for Kim Kardashian? Never That ..

Kim Kardashian puts her pant legs on one at a time like the rest of us …

I read an interesting article on Clutch magazine entitled “Kim Kardashian Makes Me Sad“, where a male writer waxes poetic about his irritation that Kim Kardashian’s entire shtick is about getting the attention of a man. The article is tongue in cheek, and an abstraction of our indifference towards Kim Kardashian, but it made me think for a minute. I never felt sorry for the “likes” of Kim Kardashian and their plight in life. If they want to sell sex, and there is a market for men to lust over them, and for women to be jealous of them, allow them to do so. The rest of us are fools for obsessing over her and allowing her to dictate standards of beauty within the Black community.

It is ironic how we feel sad for Kim Kardashian, but we are angry at our own women. Black men want to differentiate as to what makes one girl interesting and the other girl rachet; Black men like to obsess over Miley Cyrus and women of other races that are selling sex, but they do not concern themselves with their own women. It is not that I think we should objectify our women, they way we are objectifying Kim Kardashian (regardless of how you look at it), but we our hypocritical, at best, when we do so.

How can I feel sad for a woman that, after all of the men of color she has been through, still has more money than most other Black girls trying to make it in the industry and is engaged to be married to perhaps the second most popular artist at the moment and has his child? No one else was good enough to marry, but the timing (um, money) is right for Kanye to claim the woman he had always obsessed over. Kim Kardashian no longer has to do what these other girls are doing for money; she chooses to do so, but she does not have to do it. She never did in the first place, so I can’t necessarily sympathize or empathize with her situation.

If Black women are obsessed with Kim Kardashian, and any other woman that comes along part of it is because we are obsessed with women of other races. We only like Black women that are exotic (of mixed ancestry). We only like dark skinned women when their body has become a caricature of everything that we have found to be sexy or exotic in a woman, yet we like light skinned women with little, if any, figure at all. I am not mad at the writers for Clutch magazine; they have done their homework and know how to anticipate what we want to see in an online publication. But I have to question what our obsession is with other races, other cultures, anything but that the African-American community has contributed to American society over the last 100 years.